Building Trustworthy Digital Repositories: Theory and Implementation is designed to address the issue of what is a trustworthy digital repository, that is, what are the characteristics of trustworthy digital repositories (theory) and how are trustworthy digital repositories implemented (practice). The authors for both theory and practice in each chapter are experts in their fields.
The book is comprehensive, with content structured on the functions of creating a trustworthy repository – establishing policies and management structures, pre-ingest and ingest, capturing and creating metadata, capturing audit trail data, managing retention and disposal, managing access, security and preservation strategy. Each chapter consists of both a theory section and several implementation projects. The context, strategies, challenges, results and outcomes, what worked and what didn’t, and lessons learned for each project, are described in each chapter. The implementation projects are from the USA, Europe, Canada and Australia. The last chapter is a discourse on the current status and future directions of trustworthy digital repositories.
Overall, the book meets the editor’s aim of describing the functions of a trusted digital repository and providing projects that were implemented to solve specific problems for these functions. There is a great deal of information to absorb and analyse, but as an information manager, digital archiving practitioner and project manager, this reviewer was disappointed that there was not more that could be taken away and practically applied to a digital archiving implementation project. Although the projects described in each chapter are implemented to solve specific problems for the identified function, the legal framework, country, organisation sector (education, private, government, not-for-profit, library or archive) and culture limit how the approach taken and the learning can be applied. Therefore the book is neither a handbook nor a guide, but more a starting point for practitioners to consider how they might approach each trusted digital repository function and how applicable the projects, challenges and lessons are to the environment and the problem that the practitioner is trying to solve.
As a textbook, however, for instructors and students in information and information technology disciplines, the book is outstanding. The matching of theory and practice provides an experience for students that cannot be achieved outside of the work environment. The implementation projects show how theory is applied to each problem and the gap between the theoretical models and what is implemented.
The book would have benefited by additional chapters addressing organisational strategic and change management strategies, issues and challenges, as implementation of any aspect of a trusted digital repository does not occur in isolation of the legal, strategic and cultural environment. In addition, a chapter on the trusted digital repository, its alignment to the OAIS model, and implementation projects of an end-to-end solution would have been useful. Such a chapter could have demonstrated the relationships and dependencies between the model’s entities and functions and the practicalities and challenges in implementing an end-to-end solution.
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© 2017 Karen Horsfall
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2017.1279039